Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks and Gideon Lett, chief growth officer of The Software Alliance, participate in a round table discussion at the Microsoft Experience Center in Mountain View, Calif. on April 5, 2022. (DoD Photo/Chad J. McNeeley)
LOS ANGELES: When more than 15 space- and software-related startups gathered at the Space Force’s SpaceWERX innovation hub to speak with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, it meant an opportunity to share horror stories about bureaucratic red tape they’d encountered while working with the Defense Department — a near universal experience among attendees.
Lucid Circuit CEO Michel Sika, whose company makes high-performance processors and chips, said that his company had won a Space Pitch Day contest in 2019 and bagged a Small Business Innovation Research contract from the Air Force. However, it was forced to give up on the military as a customer when the money ran out.
“We waited as long as we could, but eventually we ended up going commercial,” Sika said at the gathering last week, adding that he was exploring possible re-entry into the defense sector.
Like many other companies whose executives attended the roundtable, Zoic Labs, a software development and data visualization company whose sister company Zoic Studios creates graphics for movies and TV shows like “Game of Thrones,” is finding it hard to transition its work from the prototype phase into production, said company president Tim McBride. However, even when it does land contracts, the company finds it must jump through hoops to get even basic steps accomplished.
For example, Zoic is currently working on a website for the office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, but the Government Services Administration has prevented the team from putting the new site on a .mil domain address, said Mike O’Neal, the company’s product manager.
“If I showed you the email chain you would think it was a comedy — that it’s a satire on the government,” O’Neal said.
Military innovation hubs like SPACEWERX and AFWERX have been successful in bringing nontraditional tech firms to begin working with the Pentagon, said Tom George, founder and CEO of SaraniaSat Inc.
“But the issue I have is: Are we making them fail faster by getting them to the cliff edge and then not having a transition mechanism to go across that valley of death?”
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Throughout the roundtable, Hicks spent the majority of her time listening to executives lay out their frustrations with the department, chiming in occasionally to ask questions or to articulate her understanding of the challenges they described.
Later that day, Hicks told traveling press that she was “starting to build out some ideas” of additional actions the Defense Department could take to ameliorate longstanding issues. Those problems include the aforementioned “valley of death” — Pentagon speak for the dearth of funding that sometimes occurs between the technology development phase and the point at which a company receives a production contract.
Hicks declined to discuss possible solutions, telling Breaking Defense, which accompanied her on the trip, that she was “still thinking” about various options. However, she pushed back on the assertion that the Pentagon will be able solve all bureaucratic challenges.
“There will not be government solutions to all of the challenges that the government is facing, with regard to how to kind of manage through that full innovation cycle. That said, I think there’s a lot more that we can do,” she said.
For example, “the multiplicity of handoffs in our system that are required internally to get something from point A to point B is really striking” and unique to the Pentagon’s own bureaucracy due to the scale and structure of the department.
“Getting innovation through that system is especially challenging,” she said.
Hicks traveled to California last week, meeting with space startups, scientists at national laboratories and students at leading universities like Stanford. During a stop at Microsoft’s new campus in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, she got a demonstration of the company’s HoloLens — the basis for the Army’s troubled Integrated Visual Augmentation System — and spoke to about a dozen software companies about workforce challenges.
It’s a trip that many defense secretaries and deputy defense secretaries have taken in recent years to try to boost the Pentagon’s profile in the eyes of the tech sector: Come to Silicon Valley, rub elbows with technocrats, fly back to Washington.
But Hicks said her approach differs from previous administrations, which may have over-relied on finding single-point solutions to problems instead of tweaking existing incentives to allow the acquisition process to move faster.
“My view isn’t like, I’m going to magically unlock special secret approaches that haven’t been touched before,” she told traveling press. “I think it’s more about how you start to shift the incentives. Are you coming at the right time to solve some of these problems?”
The administration has already put in place some new initiatives, such as a new “competitive advantage pathfinders” initiative meant to identify opportunities to develop tech in three key areas: long range fires, counter-C5ISR (command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), and joint all-domain command and control (JADC2). Hicks signed off on the effort last month.
The department is also seeking $100 million in its fiscal 2023 budget to support recipients of Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contracts who need to conduct additional work before moving to the next phase, reported Defense News.
However, officials believe more work needs to be done, as the department’s pace of adopting new technologies still remains slow compared to the commercial sector. Last week, Defense Innovation Unit head Mike Brown raised concerns that the Pentagon could fall behind unless it creates a mechanism to move money more rapidly to fund emerging technologies.
“We’re in a serious tech competition with China and they’re not waiting for our democratic timeframes,” he said. “I like our system better than theirs, but we have to figure out how to move more quickly.”
Timing matters, Hicks said, and the current environment is favorable for continued changes to improve the ways in which the Pentagon seeks to harness innovative technology from the commercial sector. Bipartisan support for defense spending has surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Congress has already put into place legal mechanisms that allow the Pentagon to do business faster.
And previous administrations have built up a huge number of innovation organizations native to the Defense Department, which have already begun to make inroads among tech start-ups in areas such as space, autonomy and software.
“I think the real challenges are, how do you surface the best ideas, demonstrate that they return and scale them?” Hicks said. “There’s nothing magical about that.”
